Web Essay: A culture best left behind

3:04 PM,
Jan. 29, 2013

Written by

GARY L. FITZPATRICK
Guest Essayist

My parents grew up in Floyd County, Kentucky, and in the 1930s my father taught in a school that went through the eighth grade. He told me that he occasionally stashed a pistol in his waistband for protection. From whom? Maybe the students, maybe their parents. It was a violent place.

My father liked to say he taught the three R's: reading, writing, and the road to Ohio. With the onset of World War II, my parents, like hundreds of thousands of others, left the depression-ravaged Appalachia behind for the well-paying jobs of northern factories. It was a migration driven by economics, but leaving ...